May 17th - Buddhism and the War Remnants Museum

Today we learned more about Vietnamese Culture and the war. We had a lecture on culture in the morning and in the afternoon we learned about Buddhism and went to the War Remnants Museum. We also went to a Buddhist monument and a pagoda where Buddhists go to worship.

Learning about Buddhism was very interesting and I did not know much about it before today. Buddhism is very different than Christianity and seems to be more of an entire lifestyle than a religion. Buddhists follow the teachings of the Buddha and there are monks that people can go to for guidance. Buddhists are vegetarians, hold themselves to high moral standards, and believe in a very peaceful way of life. Another fact that I found very interesting was that they do not have a certain time during the week where they all go together and have a worship service. They just go to the pagoda whenever they want and pray. We got to experience the pagoda and it was good to see where they go to worship. We had to take off our shoes when entering and it was a very quiet and calming space. Then we knelt and prayed in front of the Buddha statue. I really enjoyed learning about their way of life and being able to experience how they worship.

After the pagoda we headed to the War Remnants Museum. It was a very intense experience to see the war from a Vietnamese point of view. While we lost about 60,000 American soldiers, they lost over 3,000,000 soldiers and civilians. I was astounded by the amount of civilian casualties and how detrimental this war was for Vietnam. The exhibit that made the greatest impact on me was the one describing agent orange. Agent orange was a gas that the Americans used on the jungle to expose the Vietcong and it had disastrous effects on the civilian population. There many graphic images of children with birth defects and burn victims. This exhibit and a lot of the other images in the museum were very hard to look at. It just goes to show that there are two sides to every story and why many American citizens protested the war. It was definitely a somber experience and it was a lot to take in. This just reinforced how terrible war is and how hard we should try to avoid it. 

Buddhist pagoda

American plane outside the museum